Why linking an issue is not triggering an event Listener?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Why, exactly, I don't know.

but you are right, we've run into this a few times.  Issue linking doesn't fire any events at all.  I'm guessing it's because Atlassian never thought they'd use linking to trigger any activity. 

@Will Davis was the last person I know who managed to work around it, but I don't remember his trick well enough to explain it (and I wouldn't want to be credited for his work).

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

An open issue since 2005: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-8505

Low hanging fruit in my opinion but mine hardly matters

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Very true, I could have used it a few times too.  I voted on it ages ago.

[ARUN KUMAR MK]

Thanks for your replies. When i give comment while linking the issue, it triggers the issue_commented event, this is good for me, but the problem is i wanted to make the Comment required field, is there a way to do that. Any other solution for this problem will help me a lot. Thanks in advance.

[Will Davis]

As @Nic Brough says, I came up against this recently and was able to come up with a workaround, although it is not universally suitable. Using ScriptRunner for JIRA, we created a service that ran every minute. This service used a JQL search to identify all issues that had been updated in the last minute, and then looked up the relevant changelogs to see if those changes related to links being created or destroyed. All issues where the changes involved links then had the appropriate update made to them.

There was one large drawback to this approach - the "listener" did not act instantaneously, because the service only ran every minute - after a change was made involving a link, the update would happen up to 60 seconds afterwards. This was fine in the context of what we were trying to achieve, but not useful if an instant response to issue linking is required.